Federal prosecutors and the Cambodian governmentsay the statue was stolenfrom a Cambodian temple and should be returned to Cambodia. But a lawyer for Sotheby’s, Peter G. Neiman, said in court papers that the company’s bid to sell the antiquity on behalf of an anonymous Belgian collector was legal under its interpretation of American and Cambodian cultural property laws.

He calledprosecutors’ argumentsfor confiscating the statue “tenuous” and filled with “legal and factual holes,” and said the government was not equipped to care for the 500-pound sandstone depiction of a mythological warrior.